The MagSafe charging case for second-generation AirPods Pro that comes with a USB-C connector is now available as a separate purchase. When the updated headphones were introduced in September, many users expected the charging case would be available separately, but it wasn’t. That came as a bit of a surprise because when Qi charging was first introduced in the AirPods line, the case was offered as a separate purchase immediately. But with today’s listing on Apple’s online store, if all you want to do is swap your old Lightning case for the USB-C model, you can.
The new case is available to order on the Apple Store for $99, although deliveries in my area aren’t expected until after Christmas, and there aren’t any available for pickup in my local Charlotte, NC retail store.
One of the perks of a Club MacStories+ and Club Premier membership are special columns that Federico and I publish periodically. In today’s Automation Academy, Federico shares ThingsBox, a shortcuts capture system that can handle multiple media types on every Apple device, sending the results to the Things inbox.
As Federico explains, ThingsBox originated from a suggestion I made on AppStories recently, which he took and ran with to add functionality tailored to each type of media he saves, creating:
a versatile system for quickly capturing text, Safari webpages, URLs, App Store apps, and even images and save them as new items in the Things inbox. ThingsBox runs on every Apple platform and can be used from a widget, the share sheet, or manually inside the Shortcuts app; it is optimized for the Apple Watch, where it defaults to dictation input; on the Mac, ThingsBox integrates with AppleScript to see what the frontmost window is and capture its data accordingly.
Sharing different types of input with ThingsBox…
…and the resulting tasks in the inbox.
Automation Academy is one of the many perks of a Club MacStories+ and Club Premier membership and an excellent way to learn advanced Shortcuts techniques that are explained in the context of solutions to everyday problems.
I’ve been keeping a journal in Day One since at least 2015, and I’ve got to say, the practice has become very engrained in my otherwise chaotic daily routine. Whenever I get asked about journaling, I always say that it’s a habit that can take any form you like. It can take place in a paper journal, in an app as written entries, as voice notes, or even as captioned photos in a photo diary. The reason I stuck with Day One over the years is because the app is incredibly flexible. It kept up with me during periods of my life when it was harder to write down my daily thoughts, and easier to type a couple of bullet points every day instead. I believe the best journaling tools are those that can adapt to you, not the other way around. But still, when Apple announced they were building their own Journal app, built right into iOS 17, I was excited by the prospect of switching things up in this little habit of mine.
This week, Apple released the Journal app as part of iOS 17.2. As expected, the app is unfortunately only available on the iPhone. Nevertheless, Apple’s first entry in this category is very interesting, to say the least, as it revolves almost entirely around a system of smart journaling suggestions and prompts. I’ve been using it alongside Day One for a couple of weeks now, to both get an idea of what Apple’s approach to journaling is like, and to see how it intends to bring journaling to a wider audience.
HoudahSpot is a powerful file search utility that makes finding files a snap and keeps those that you use the most close at hand, saving you time over and over every day. HoudahGeo lets you geotag photos by pinning them to the map locations where you took them. Photos Workbench is indispensable for organizing, geotagging, rating, and managing your photos. Finally, Tembo is a search assistant for documents, mail messages, images, videos, and more that groups files by type and includes multiple sorting and filtering options.
Discounts are just one of the many Club MacStories perks.
To put the Club deals into context, taking advantage of them all would save you more than the cost of two years of Club Premier, the highest Club tier. That’s before you even consider the many other perks Club MacStories and Club Premier members enjoy, including:
Weekly and monthly newsletters
A sophisticated web app with search and filtering tools to navigate eight years of content
Customizable RSS feeds
Bonus columns
An early and ad-free version of our Internet culture and media podcast, MacStories Unwind
A vibrant Discord community of smart app and automation fans who trade a wealth of tips and discoveries every day
Live Discord audio events after Apple events and at other times of the year
On top of that, Club Premier members get AppStories+, an extended, ad-free version of our flagship podcast that we deliver early every week in high-bitrate audio.
Use the buttons below to learn more and sign up for Club MacStories+ or Club Premier.
On AppStories+, Federico and I go behind-the-scenes to discuss the logistics of picking the annual MacStories Selects Award winners and shipping awards worldwide.
Today, Apple released iOS and iPadOS 17.2, the second major updates to the operating systems that launched in September and I reviewed on MacStories.
iOS and iPadOS 17.2 revolve around two kinds of enhancements: there are a series of updates to built-in apps (mostly Messages, Music, and Camera) and various tweaks to widgets; then, there’s the brand new Journal app for iPhone, which aims to reinvent the practice of journaling for iOS users with a built-in solution that’s deeply integrated with the OS and apps.
We’re going to cover Journal with a standalone article on MacStories from the perspective of someone who’s been keeping a journal in Day One for several years. In this story, I’m going to focus on what else is new in iOS and iPadOS 17.2 and the different improvements you’ll find throughout the system.
John: Every year, it seems like the MacStories Selects awards roll around faster than the last, and this year was no exception. For most people, the year begins on January 1st, but for us, WWDC marks the beginning of our year, and the MacStories Selects Awards feel like its conclusion. Plenty happens the rest of the year, but it’s these seven months that are the main event for us.
June begins with excitement about what developers will be able to do with Apple’s latest frameworks. Reconnecting with developers and meeting new people energizes and carries us through a busy summer and fall. This year marked Federico’s return to WWDC for the first time since the pandemic, and seeing so many developers together made this year’s WWDC the best in years.
2023 was an exciting year for apps. Read-later apps continued to be hot, but nothing was quite as big as interactive widgets, which brought new experiences to our Home and Lock Screens and shook up how many of us set up our devices.
Next year promises to be an even bigger year for apps with an all-new Vision Pro App Store on the way. For now, though, it’s time to pause and reflect on the many apps we tried in the year gone by and recognize the best among them.
Like last year, we’ve picked the best apps in seven categories:
Best New App
Best App Update
Best New Feature
Best Watch App
Best Mac App
Best Design
App of the Year
But there’s more. Club MacStories members picked the winner of the MacStories Selects Readers’ Choice Award. Plus, as we’ve done the past couple of years, we’ve named a Lifetime Achievement Award winner that has stood the test of time and had an outsized impact on the world of apps. This year’s winner, which joins past winners PCalc and Drafts, is the subject of a special story I wrote for the occasion.
We also recorded a special episode of AppStories covering all the winners and runners-up. It’s a terrific way to learn more about this year’s apps.
You can listen to the episode below.
0:00 46:16
So with that, it’s my pleasure to introduce the 2023 MacStories Selects Awards to the MacStories community.
It’s no secret that we’re big fans of the Pixelmator Team’s image editing apps at MacStories. A lot of our coverage in recent years has focused on Pixelmator Pro and Photomator, but long before those apps ever hit the App Store, there was just plain Pixelmator, an app that’s still available on the iPhone and iPad, and I still use regularly.
Pixelmator debuted on the Mac in the fall of 2007. Here’s how the Pixelmator Team described the release on its blog:
Pixelmator Team today released Pixelmator 1.0, GPU-powered image editing tool that provides everything needed to create, edit, and enhance still images.
Built from the ground up on a combination of open source and Mac OS X technologies, Pixelmator features powerful selection, painting, retouching, navigation, and color correction tools, and layers-based image editing, GPU-powered image processing, color management, automation, and transparent HUD user interface for work with images.
It’s fun to look back at the app’s launch page with its focus on the iSight camera, iPhoto, and the latest Mac OS X technologies like Core Image and Open GL. It feels dated now, but the fundamentals that made Pixelmator an exciting new app in 2007 are just as important for the app and the Pixelmator Team’s other apps today as they were then.
Getting OS updates installed on end user devices should be easy. After all, it’s one of the simplest yet most impactful ways that every employee can practice good security.
On top of that, every MDM solution promises that it will automate the process and install updates with no user interaction needed.
Yet in the real world, it doesn’t play out like that. Users don’t install updates and IT admins won’t force installs via forced restart.
Let’s talk about the second problem first. Sure, you could simply schedule updates for all your users, and have them restart during non-work hours. But this inevitably leads to disruptions and lost work. This, in turn, leads to users (especially executives) who simply demand to be left out of your update policy. The bottom line is: any forced restarts without user approval will lead to data loss events, and that makes them so unpopular that they are functionally unusable.
There is another class of tools that claim to get users to install updates themselves, through “nudges.” These reminders pop up with increasing frequency until users relent or the timer runs out. This is an improvement, since it involves users in the process, but users still tend to delay updating as long as possible (which for some tools can be indefinitely).
At Kolide, OS updates are the single most common issue customers want us to solve. They come to us because we have a unique (and uniquely effective) approach to device compliance.
With Kolide, when a user’s device–be it Mac, Windows, Linux, or mobile–is out of compliance, we reach out to them with instructions on how to fix it.
The user chooses when to restart, but if they don’t fix the problem by a predetermined deadline, they’re unable to authenticate with Okta. (At present, Kolide is exclusive to Okta customers, but we plan to integrate with more SSO providers soon.)
If your fleet is littered with devices that stubbornly refuse to update, then consider these two principles:
You can’t have a successful patch management policy without involving users.
You can’t get users to install patches unless you give them both clear instructions and real consequences.
Installing OS updates is a top priority for both security and IT, and when you make it part of conditional access, you can finally get it done without massive lists of exemptions or massive piles of support tickets.
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